The Substance of Self-Government

Abstract

In Democratic Rights: The Substance of Self-Government, Corey Brettschneider develops an attractive and powerful conception of self-government – the value theory of democracy – that encompasses both substantive rights like privacy and procedural rights. Although he argues, following Habermas and Rawls, that substantive rights and procedural rights are “co-original,” the structure of his theory may lead him to reduce the former into the latter and not fully to account for personal self-government in his conception of democratic self-government. The wages of his democratic justifications for substantive rights may be a surprising anxiety or unwarranted tension concerning judicial review protecting such rights.